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Authors
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
This chapter investigates a specific change that took place in the history of Portuguese involving the extraposition of restrictive relative clauses. From an empirical point of view, it is shown that earlier stages of Portuguese contrast with contemporary European Portuguese with respect to the following properties: (i) definiteness effect; (ii) extraposition from prepositional phrases; and (iii) extraposition from pre-verbal constituents. From a theoretical point of view, it is demonstrated no syntactic structure alone can derive the contrasting properties of extraposition. To account for the variation found in the diachronic and cross-linguistic dimension, it is argued that extraposition of restrictive relative clauses may involve two different structures: the specifying coordination plus ellipsis (De Vries 2002) and stranding (Kayne 1994). Languages and different stages of the same language may then diverge with respect to the structure they display.
Description
Keywords
Extraposition Relative clauses Information structure Raising analysis Stranding analysis Specifying coordination analysis Scrambling
Citation
Cardoso, A. (2012). Extraposition of restrictive relative clauses in the history of Portuguese. In C. Galves, S. Cyrino, R. Lopes, F. Sandalo & J. Avelar (Eds.), Parameter theory and linguistic change (pp. 77-96). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Publisher
Oxford University Press